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Mitsubishi Outlander

We might still be riding out an unusually warm summer, but here in New England, the phrase “winter is coming” brings with it a very specific set of feelings. No, I’m not talking about dread and despair, I’m talking about something much more positive. You see, although New England winter may earn headlines by delivering winter storms, polar vortexes, and record-setting snowfall, it never arrives before autumn foliage, apple-picking, and most importantly, football season.

With this past year being a rare exception, winters in New England are a serious business. So, when the New England Motor Press Association gets together to award the best winter vehicles of the year, the industry takes notice.

Although the typical winter’s day this year was more hospitable than during the past few years, the official winter testing day for NEMPA’s auto experts was still a bitterly cold, windy affair – complete with weather service advisories instructing people to stay inside (just check out our Infiniti QX50 impression for proof). Undeterred, we gathered at Bugsy Lawlor’s Automotion garage to test the best winter rigs of the year.

We’re not ready to declare summer dead and buried, but football season is nevertheless upon us. This weekend, the NCAA will kick off the Division I College Football season, and with that, we’re bringing back one of our all-time favorite topics: Tailgating. In the past, we’ve shown you plenty of capacious trucks, vans, and body-on-frame SUVs, but this year we thought we’d try something a little different. Sure, a brand new F-150, 4Runner, or Odyssey will offer tons of space for your friends, beer, and grillables, but they also include a major drawback—they’re incredibly expensive.

With another school year about to begin, parents nationwide are preparing to spend lots more time driving children to and from after-school activities. According to a recent CarGurus online poll of car shoppers with school-age kids, 38% of parents estimate they spend between 30 minutes and an hour shuttling their kids around on a typical weekday, while 33% of parents polled say they spend more than an hour. If your current daily driver isn’t up to the task, here are 10 vehicles with high safety ratings that also offer plenty of cargo space, seating capacity, cabin comforts, and a host of modern technology features that should at least make that extra time spent shuttling children around a little more comfortable for the whole family.

The 2015 New York International Auto Show will come to a close this weekend, and as usual, automakers packed the Javits Center with beautiful new vehicles in hopes of making as big a splash as they could during the crowded hypefest. We attended last week’s 2-day press preview, and we have to say it was a very fun but exhausting trip; the automakers like to keep the press moving around the venue. But we moved quickly and made it to nearly all the press conferences with help from plenty of free coffee and some life-saving free chairs.

Some of the biggest names in the business were there to show off what the next year of production has to offer the market. Automakers all more or less stressed the same common themes throughout the preview, but some of the more unexpected themes included fuel cells, semi-autonomous-driving features, and affordable luxury (with the exception of Land Rover and Jaguar, who touted their models’ steep price tags). Dozens of reveals took place at the press conferences, and we thought we’d share our impressions on some of the biggest.